


Pluck Your Feathers From Your Breast

by Blueinkedfrost



Category: Heathers (1988), Heathers: The Musical - Murphy & O'Keefe
Genre: Alternate Universe, Fantasy, Gen, Harpies, Mythology - Freeform, Phoenixes, Transformation, mythological creatures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2019-04-04 18:46:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14026428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blueinkedfrost/pseuds/Blueinkedfrost
Summary: Heather McNamara has a monstrous secret. If she can hide her true nature and be obedient, popular, and powerful, she might survive high school. Or she might not.





	Pluck Your Feathers From Your Breast

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Guest Reviewer for Eyes, Blood, and Ashes chapter 16, who requested Heather M. This isn't set in the same universe, but I hope you like it!

"A bird whose wings have been plucked  
Will shed all its feathers  
And turn back into the beast it was  
Before it evolved into a bird."  
\- The Big O

—

Every night, Heather's parents scream at each other because of her. Harsh, shrill voices accuse each other.

_Bad blood, tainted blood, throwback._

Her father blames her mother. _It was from you. You know it was from you._

Heather's mother is beautiful but birdlike. She wears long painted nails that she never uses. She never has to pick up anything in her hands. She tells other people what to do with only her steel-voiced words. Heather has seen her at her work, her airy offices in her yellow suit and pristine white silk blouse, tapping and rejecting new designs with her shining nails while her workers scurry around her like frightened kittens. This bird is one that would eat cats.

_Aberrant. Freak. Monster. You are these things, Heather._

Heather's father has pure blood. He sells talismans. The McNamara name is a good one for talismans. Love, riches, protection, happiness, light against the darkness, or so he claims. Couples beginning a new life together buy talismans to keep themselves safe from monsters such as Heather.

_Filthy-winged. Gore-taloned. Corpse-eater. Revenge-crone. Waste-gorging, liver-eating. Foul-breathed and fouler-beaked. This is what you will become, Heather._

Heather wishes she could fly. Heather plucks her own feathers from her breast every night, all sharp pain and thick bright blood. She takes yellow pills from her mother, wears a golden talisman from her father about her neck, until she looks almost human.

 _Harpy_ is the name of the monster Heather is. Harpies fly outside the civilized world and eat corpses. They are iron-taloned and iron-beaked. Abominable waste drips from their wings and eyes.

 _I should have married a pureblood_ , shouts her father. _You married me because my great-grandmother made a fortune and no one cared where it came from_ , accuses her mother. Her parents hate each other like poison, and cannot split up like they want to because they hide her secret between them.

They allow Heather to leave the attic and go to school when she can pretend to be normal. She needs to obey if she wants to be human. She finds friends, protection, a person to tell her what to do and how to be.

Heather becomes one of three at school. Three beautiful girls all exactly the same, all untouchable. Heather McNamara models herself after Heather Chandler, human, normal, powerful, the leader. She becomes a copy of Heather, like a Louis Vuitton rip-off with the logo spelt wrong when you look at it closely, dresses like her and speaks like her and follows her guidance. Heather Duke's another copy of Heather, only she doesn't do it quite as well as Heather McNamara. They're all Heathers. It's perfect. They're perfect.

Heather discovers cheerleading, goes for tryouts on a dare from some girl in geography class. Heather Chandler's not a joiner for any team. But Heather McNamara learns that cheerleading feels like flying. She tumbles and dances, weightless when she leaps through the air. She spins in dizzying circles and flings herself out and away, catching the wind and slipping into the next pose with grace. She's light-boned, bird-boned, easy for spotters to catch. She loves it almost more than anything, except for being a Heather.

Heather Chandler knows things about people, things people tell her so that they themselves will escape her razor tongue and cruel attacks. She angers people so they say more than they mean to, then smiles and strikes back, flawlessly, perfectly, maiming in a single blow. Heather McNamara follows her, always adding a secondary insult of her own.

Heather Chandler says she saw Martha Dunnstock, Martha Dumptruck, eat a live mouse in the girls' bathroom. Martha isn't human. She's a monster, a lamia, part python. Her swollen stomach digests animals and probably human babies. Heather Chandler rips open Martha's shirt in the cafeteria, Heather McNamara and Heather Duke holding one of Martha's arms each. No one objects because they all see Martha's scales over her skin.

No one from Sherwood sees Martha Dumptruck again.

Heather McNamara remembers a photo she saw on a sleepover at Heather Duke's house. She was awake in that blue-black hour past midnight when no one else was conscious, plucking out a stray feather from her hair and burying it deep in the garbage below everything else. Restless, curious, she opened a box in the back of Heather Duke's closet. She saw Heather and Martha together, tiny children, best friends once. She saw the two of them hugging at camp, wearing princess and soldier costumes, making macramé together. Before Heather Duke became powerful in the Heathers.

Heather McNamara never says anything to Heather Duke about it, about how easy it might be for a friend to turn on another friend when they know she's a monster on the inside.

Halfway through sophomore year, Heather Chandler chooses Veronica Sawyer. Heather McNamara doesn't like it at first, someone new in their group, someone dark and cold and sarcastic. Veronica is sharp like a knife that could strike from any direction, no one ever knowing what she thinks behind her secretive sphinx-hazel eyes. Veronica's almost as confident as Heather Chandler, almost powerful enough to be the same as her, even if she doesn't realize it. Heather McNamara doesn't understand Veronica and thinks Veronica often laughs at her behind her smile, but she pretends none of it bothers her. Then, over time, it's like there's always been Heather and Heather and Heather and Veronica. It's good to have a fourth in the croquet games and Veronica forges notes for Heather to skip math. Veronica's human, with human power like Heather Chandler, and Heather McNamara almost looks up to her.

The Heathers need to date boys, popular wealthy boys who'll make them even more popular and buy them gifts. Heather Chandler goes through boys like discarded blotting-paper stained with oily lipstick, throwing them away the moment they fail to measure up to her standards, Country Club Keith and Kurt Kelly the quarterback and Peter the prep. It makes her all the more widely wanted. Then Heather chooses David from college, who's not even in high school, and that makes her even better. Veronica's like Heather Chandler, dropping the drip boy who liked stupid geeky stories, briefly dating a bunch of popular boys and changing her mind a lot. Heather Duke just wants to bury her nose in _Moby-Dick_ and never date no matter how much Heather Chandler tells her that she's a frigid flat-chested little prepubescent pillowcase. And Heather McNamara has Ram Sweeney, the linebacker.

"Ram's sweet," Heather says, perhaps because she wants to believe he is. Ram Sweeney takes her to a drive-in movie and paws her in the car, not looking at a thing on the screen, his hands under her shirt and his head buried in her chest. Heather touches the wrinkled vinyl of the car seat, arms still on each side, and doesn't move, lets Ram do whatever he wants. He isn't as bad as the last boy she allowed to do things to her, she thinks. This is what it means to be popular and protected. She's safe as long as she's obedient.

_(She wonders what it would be like to have iron talons and rip out men's hearts.)_

In the cafeteria, Heather Chandler plays the note game against dweebette Betty Finn. It's a game that Veronica makes possible, since she can imitate anyone's writing. Veronica uses Heather Duke's back as a table, fakes a note for Betty from her crush Peter, then Heather McNamara slips it onto Betty's lunch tray. They giggle as Betty gets up to speak to Peter. Heather Chandler's happy and her friends need to share her sense of humor. Then it's time for the lunchtime poll, asking everyone the same complicated question. Veronica stares at the new boy in the corner of the cafeteria and doesn't even seem to hear Heather Chandler's instructions.

"His name's Jason Dean. He's in my history class," Heather McNamara tells Veronica about the new kid. There's not much to tell. The teacher made him stand up and told everyone his name, then he sat down and didn't say anything. He's ugly and greasy and wears a horrible old trenchcoat that looks like it came out of a dumpster. But Veronica stares at the new kid as if she's about to make a puddle in her panties, despite her usual icy untouchable look.

Heather McNamara knows more about Jason Dean than his name. She's seen the commercials. She thinks her parents almost like her to watch those commercials, glancing at her to check she hasn't turned her eyes away, making sure she knows why she has to obey and stay safe. The commercials have a man with the same name, Dean, an older man with iron-grey hair. Dean's father is a monster hunter just come to Sherwood. He kills things like Heather for a living. He's scary and twisted and wrong, and Heather McNamara hopes she'll never have to see Jason Dean again. When Kurt and Ram decide to beat up the new kid, she hopes they'll drive him away from school for good. Something like a broken leg, hurt him just enough that he stays away.

Except Jason Dean hurts Kurt and Ram instead, and Veronica's into his act all the more.

Heather loses out on cheerleading captain to Anna Pennick and tries not to cry. It's not fair. She's the best at jumping and spinning, the fastest cartwheel, the highest vault. Maybe the other girls don't like her because she's too good at flying, or a Heather, or too stupid, or something. Or maybe, worst of all, they glimpsed a hint of a feather in her hair. She plucks at herself more than ever, morning and night and locked in the bathroom at lunch, wipes off blood and hides her ugliness under makeup.

Heather's parents constantly scream at each other and want to separate like a pair of trapped animals, and she doesn't tell her friends that's why she'll never invite them to a sleepover at her place. Her only real friend is her canary in a cage. She loves the way it sings inside its bars, happy and chirping at her when she gives it water and kale and seeds. She sits with her old yellow teddy bear on her bed and watches it.

And Heather's failing math. She gets an 'F' the day she finds out that Heather Chandler's dead. It shouldn't matter to her but somehow it does, and she drips tear-tracks all over the test paper that tells her how stupid she is.

( _She's meant to be a corpse-eater, carrion-marked, revenge-crone. With her best friend dead, shouldn't they get a whole week off school, not just an hour?_ )

The world's spinning away from Heather. She needs Heather Chandler. Everything in Westerburg centered around Heather Chandler, like a glittering pillar holding up the entire building, like the _x_ in a math problem that stayed the same while the other numbers around it twisted and changed, like the queen ant in the heart of a nest that told all the other ants the right things to do. Heather was human and more powerful than anyone else Heather McNamara knew. Now she's gone, maybe Veronica is strong enough to be her.

Heather begs Veronica to come with her for Ram Sweeney and Kurt Kelly. _Please leave Jason Dean alone and I'll be your best friend, I promise. Just one night, just one double date._

Then Heather's in a muddy cow pasture pinned down by Ram's weight. If flying has an opposite this is it. She struggles against Ram this time, but he holds her down and kisses her and shoves his hand between her legs.

She hears the noise of a motorbike. Veronica escapes Kurt when Jason Dean picks her up, flying away with him on the winds. Heather thinks of crying out, shrieking, shouting no with everything inside her, but she doesn't.

( _She could scream for help. Veronica would only laugh and say she got what she was asking for, and Ram would do what he wanted and it would be even worse then, because she would know for sure that no one would help her._ )

She only tries wordlessly to push Ram off her. He bears down on her light bones and shoves her easily into the mud. It's a long and painful night. Heather tries to tell herself that she loves this, loves him, Ram's her steady boyfriend and he's popular and she's popular, and maybe one day he'll buy her a wedding talisman and they'll have five kids and three canaries and a huge shaggy dog.

Two days later, Ram Sweeney and Kurt Kelly are both dead.

Heather looks at the coffins of two football heroes and tries not to feel hungry, tries not to imagine ripping the wood open with iron teeth and talons and feasting on their livers. Harpies tear graves open and eat the guts of dead men. Harpies get their revenge.

( _Poor little Heather. Poor little Heather. You're so stupid, Heather._ )

Heather never thought, before, how often Heather Chandler told Heather Duke to shut up. Now Heather Duke, the bookworm who tried and failed to be Heather, the shy flat-chested girl who never even dated, is the queen of the school. Veronica is nowhere to be found, and Heather tells herself that she wouldn't have helped anyway.

Whispers imbue the school, echoing like a spirit's voice in a cave bouncing against crannied walls, rushing like paper lanterns filled with fire in the air. Heather McNamara is sad and failing math and her parents hate each other and she missed out on head cheerleader and the last guy she had sex with killed himself the next day. Everyone despises the stupid slut. She tried so hard to be human and beautiful and powerful and obedient. It didn't work.

Heather goes to her desk, and there's a big yellow teddy bear waiting for her on it. _Poor Little Heather_ is written on its stomach in black paint that looks like tar, still-sticky and sick and dark. Once she told Heather Duke and her other friends about her teddy bear in a drunk truth-or-dare game. She hates herself for being so stupid. Tears well in her eyes. Poor little Heather, still has a teddy bear, and the whole school knows it now.

Heather reaches out hesitantly, almost touching the bear. Then the bear moves, not from her touch but from something contained inside it. It's horrible, a nightmare. Somehow the bear's stuffed stomach roils underneath savage cuts in its cloth. Then black spiders pour out of the bear, spill in every direction over Heather's desk, eight black legs and plump black bodies skittering in every direction. Heather screams. She's afraid of spiders. Heather Duke's father owns the Sherwood weavers' temple, where they're sacred, and she has three younger brothers willing to pick them up and torment their sister's friends with them. Heather runs out of the room, abandoning the class, vomit and tears both rushing up inside her as everybody laughs at her.

Heather McNamara can't face the jeers all around her. She's pathetic. She always did what Heather and Kurt and Ram asked her to do, so even for someone as stupid as her, it's easy to think what should come next.

Heather counts out the yellow pills her mother gave her, the pills that make her normal. Just two a day because they're powerful. She shoves all twenty of them in her mouth. She looks at herself in the bathroom mirror, at her disgusting hamster cheeks stuffed full like a fat girl, chews the yellow pills to choke them down so she doesn't have to look at herself any more.

Then she feels the stinging slap over her face. She spits. She falls. She vomits. She chokes and spews out the pills and more than that. Heather regorges bright blood, the color all wrong for blood, a vivid shade she's never seen from herself before. Feathers soaked with the blood lie among the pills, feathers grown inward and painfully choked out from Heather's stomach, from her throat. The feathers are colored by the blood. She cries, her tears shining like diamonds in the mess she made. Veronica slapped her, Veronica brought her back from the escape she wanted to make. Veronica can see the feathers and the weird blood. Veronica knows now that she's a monster.

She looks at Veronica, crying more, knowing that she knows, knowing that Veronica can be every bit as powerful and enthralling as Heather Chandler, every bit as cold and clever and cutting and cruel.

_(You're a monster, Heather. A harpy. Go eat some corpses, and I'll have you dragged out of town on a rail like a freak.)_

She gets a hug. And a pep talk on how she shouldn't do stuff like that. They go shoe shopping.

 _Are you going to ..._? Heather asks Veronica timidly, looking down at a pair of white gold Ferragamo pumps. Veronica gives her an answer that isn't really an answer, but it's enough for her. _No, I'm not going to ask. You're probably stronger than you think you are, Heather._

Everyone still says _Poor little Heather_ , but Heather still has that moment to cling to, someone powerful who reached out a hand to save her instead of condemn her. Heather practices her cheerleading stretches with the rest of the team, the captain's eyes on her. This is the big pep rally. Anna Pennick would love to kick her off the team. If she screws this up, she could lose everything.

Then Veronica rushes in from behind her and grabs her arm. She looks wild, like a leopard. _Please come with me. You have power. I have to stop him._

Heather hesitates. The cheerleading captain glares at her. _You're not walking off, McNamara_ , she threatens. _You suck at practice and you cry in public. Last chance._ Heather knows the costs of disobedience.

 _Yes_ , Heather says. _I quit._

Veronica helped her. She'll help Veronica.

The boiler room is black, all black. The lights have been hacked out with a knife. Veronica has a gun in her hand. It's weird. The steps are slippery. Veronica falls, then Heather realizes they've been coated with Vaseline or something. She keeps her balance. All those years of cheerleading. She steps forward, and razor wire strung across her shoulder height catches her wings. ( _Arms. They are her arms._ ) She is damaged, falling down, bleeding, unable to fight the man in the darkness. The traps he set have doomed them all.

The boy in black knows hate and anger. The real monsters are human, Jason Dean says, and they all deserve to die. _I saw what you did to Betty Finn. Heard what you did to a Martha Dunnstock_ , he tells Heather. _I knew what you are and I didn't tell, I didn't care. You're as much a monster as anyone. As much a monster as my dad._

The boy in black holds Veronica. _Not expecting you to fall into my arms again, considering you broke up with me then made me think you were dead, but I'm glad it happened. We can roast s'mores_ , he says. Then he slams Veronica against something. Veronica stops talking.

Upstairs in the gym, thermal shells will destroy Westerburg when the trigger incendiary goes off here. It's stolen from the monster hunter's work. Red numbers blink in the darkness, the only thing Heather can see in the black, descending moment by moment. Countdown on.

Heather bleeds and she thinks her ankle's broken. She can't walk, the pain's too terrible. But she heard the gun drop when Veronica fell. So she crawls around for it, in the dark. Her fingers meet cold metal.

Then Veronica comes back from her feigned unconsciousness. She brains Dean with something heavy, maybe the fire extinguisher from the wall. Heather shouts out to Veronica, flings the gun across the floor so she has a chance. She couldn't shoot a person herself, but Veronica was always strong. But Heather's miscalculated again, stupid and wrong, Dean's still fighting and they both reach for the gun.

One shot, painful in Heather's ears. She doesn't know who it is, and the countdown beeps down and ever downward on the incendiary device. Heather moves, rills of blinding pain shooting through her leg. She can feel her feathers growing on her. She's crying, she doesn't remember when she started, and the drops of her tears are diamond. They give white light in the darkness, illuminating the ground. She sees Veronica, sitting over Jason Dean, pressing her hands to his chest, a red stain growing and spreading over her skin while he says nothing.

Heather touches a feather on her right hand. It glows gold, showing her Veronica's pale face and desperate eyes as she begs Dean for help. _Turn it off. Tell me how to turn it off._

 _Try the red one_ , he croaks, and then he can't seem to say anything any more. Unfortunately all three buttons are red.

Heather drags herself to the incendiary. Her feathers grow thick and fast, a forest of feathers, stronger than she ever felt before. They all shine with golden light in the darkness. She can't bear to pluck them out of her chest this time. She feels her wings. They glow, they're radiating out of her with heat like the morning sun. The red numbers tick down, the time that Westerburg has to live.

So Heather takes the incendiary device. Unfurls her wings. She can't walk, but she can fly. She soars. She flies over the black stairs and over the traps and out of the boiler room. They all see her escape the school, see Heather's monstrous wings and harpy face, but now that doesn't matter.

She flies as high as she can. Ten to go. Nine. Eight. She hears the beeping. She sees the quiet town, spread out before her like a dolls-house picture, tiny and unreal. If such a place burnt, maybe it wouldn't matter. Or maybe it did, maybe it mattered more than she did. She flies even higher. _A monster should die. I had nothing anyway. Only a harpy's last revenge. Veronica saved me and I balanced the scales._

Two. One. Heather doesn't close her eyes, wants to see the sun as she dies.

And then all is light and fire, the sun brighter than ever.

The incendiary device did its work. It should have blown her to fragments all over the sky. But her monstrosity saved her.

Heather isn't normal any more. She never was. She has wings that span far wider than her arms ever did, ending in spurs instead of fingers. Her feet are barely there; she's made for flight, not perching. She has an ivory beak, smooth and pearly.

She looks at her own feathers for the first time, really looks at them. Harpies are black birds, vultures, corpse-eaters. Harpies don't have glowing fire on them. Harpies don't survive incendiaries.

She is not a harpy. She's a phoenix. The difference is like a gob of beery spit and a glass of blue sea-grape wine, something repulsive and something different but lovely in its own way. She is fiery and gold and winged. She is the joy of flight and the searing glorious love of wind and sky.

( _Maybe being a monster is something you do rather than something you are. Maybe some harpies are good. Maybe a phoenix was another kind of harpy all along. But the thoughts overwhelm Heather, so she gives herself up to flight and joy again._ )

She tastes the air in her beak. She moves muscles she didn't know she had in new patterns, flexing and striving along with the air currents. Her wide bright wings catch the sunlight and throw it back. She lends her gold wings as a gift to the heavens, spiralling and spinning and somersaulting boldly and fluidly without end.

Heather is reborn from the ashes.

She flies onward and upward, into endless high sheets of blue.

She might make some new friends, she thinks.

**Author's Note:**

> I think parts of this are similar to sylph_feather's [Monsters and Men series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/964806) \- check it out, it's really good!


End file.
